Tuesday, July 20, 2010

On Sunday, July 18, I was honored to have my poem, Blueberry, featured at Your Daily Poem. This site is the project of Jayne Jaudon Ferrer. In 2001, Jayne started delivering poems to a limited group of friends and relatives during the month of April. She did that each April for several years. Then as the list grew, Jayne decided to create a daily website that would be available to everyone. That website is now just a bit more than a year old. You can get your daily poem by visiting the Your Daily Poem website, or you can go to the website and subscribe. If you subscribe, then you will receive each day's poem via email. All poems are archived at the website.

One of Jayne's goals is to make poetry enjoyable to people who might think they don't like poetry but really have just never found the kind of poems that speak to them. Jayne's selections are very democratic and include the well published and the newly published. Her selections cross time periods and geographical borders. One very nice feature is a lovely introduction to each poem. Each poem is followed by a poet picture, bio, and links to Amazon.

"Blueberry" is from my second book, What Feeds Us, but today I am guest blogging at novelist Meg Waite Clayton's blog, 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started, about my first book, Eve's Red Dress. This blog includes Meg's own entries about the publication of her novels, The Wednesday Sisters and the forthcoming The Four Ms. Bradwells, as well as entries from a variety of authors on their own experiences getting that first book published.

This past April Meg decided to bring in some poets, so she started "Poetry Tuesdays." Now she has decided to resurrect and continue this as an occasional Tuesday feature. So today I'm blogging about my journey to getting my first poetry book, Eve's Red Dress. This was challenging to do as my head is now filled with thoughts about my recently published third collection, Temptation by Water. But I enjoyed looking backwards and retracing my footsteps. Speaking of feet, those really are not my dirty feet! But I still love them.

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About Me

I live and write poetry in New Jersey. I am the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement. My earlier books are Temptation by Water (Wind Pub, 2010), What Feeds Us, which received the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, and Eve's Red Dress. I am also the author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, a how-to book for poets; and the sequel, The Crafty Poet II. My poems appear in a number of anthologies such as Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times and in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. My poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. I am the founder, editor, and publisher of Terrapin Books, a small press for poetry books.